The Separation of Corporate Ownership and Control : A Reinterpretation of the Evidence of Berle and Means

Contents:

Berle and Means' classic study of the separation of ownership and control remains authoritative and influential despite having been criticised on various grounds by a number of authors. This paper argues that, firstly, the Berle and Means approach to determining company control implicitly assumes a static framework inappropriate to analysing early twentieth century corporations. Secondly, accepting their approach, their control-type criterion in terms of shareholding concentration is too high and biases their result. Thirdly, the use of the same criterion for all companies fails to recognise the importance of shareholding dispersion and further biases their results. A probabilistic-voting model is described which makes explicit the assumptions behind the concept of factual control. This is applied to the data on 16 companies used by Berle and Means and their classification of them as managerial is shown to be invalid.

To our knowledge, this item is not available for
download. To find whether it is available, there are three
options:
1. Check below under "Related research" whether another version of this item is available online.
2. Check on the provider's web page
whether it is in fact available.
3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be
available.

When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wrk:warwec:247. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Helen Neal)

If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with this form.

If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through
the various RePEc services.